New Romantic style, new era for Westwood
Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren were already figureheads of style-setting London during the 1970s, with the now-famous store at 430 Kings Road acting as the locus for their fashion experiments. In the mid-‘70s, the store became known as Seditionaries and it was Westwood and McLaren who defined punk visually, largely through their iconic styling of the Sex Pistols - the band played their first gig wearing clothes from Seditionaries.
But by the early 1980s, the working relationship between Westwood and McLaren was drawing to a close and it was time for Westwood to strike out on her own to capitalise on the success of 430 Kings Road and her status as the leading figure in the British avant-garde style.
Idea
Although youth and street culture had been the focus of Westwood’s collections at the Kings Road store during the 1970s, by the 1980s she had started to become interested in tradition and technique. This informed the development of her first catwalk show, Pirate, which was presented in Olympia, London in March 1981 as that year’s Autumn/Winter collection. The collection was themed around ideas of gold and treasure, adventure and exploration. At the same time, the shop was renamed World’s End, as it has remained to this day.
Shortly after the launch of the Pirate collection, Westwood began to show in Paris, the first British designer to do so since Mary Quant, and by 1986 she had shifted away from youth and street culture altogether, looking instead to traditional tailoring, British fabrics and 17th and 18th century art for inspiration.
Impact
Not only was Pirate Westwood’s first runway show, but it also represents the start of her now lifelong technical research into historical dress techniques. With the Pirate collection Westwood adopted and reinterpreted original cutting principles into her patterns and reinvented them as modern styles. The Design Museum describes this period in Westwood’s work as bringing ‘to the fore the habit for which she is renowned: raiding history for ideas’.
The Pirate collection’s styling also kick-started the visual aspects of the New Romantic movement, adopted by musicians and their fans. ‘Adam and the Ants and Spandau Ballet wore billowing, lavishly printed gold, red and orange shirts inspired by Westwood’s study of 18th century men’s clothing, but flamboyantly fused with North American Indian and pirate styles. The collection released a rakish and androgynous sexual overtone that took 1980s Britain by surprise,’ says the Design Museum’s profile on Westwood.
In 1983, the collaboration with McLaren came to an end, but Westwood’s success with Pirate in London and Nostalgia of Mud in Paris led to an invitation to show her collections in the ‘Best of Five’ global fashion awards in Tokyo in 1984. At this show her work featured alongside that of Hanae Mori, Calvin Klein, Claude Montana and Gianfranco Ferre.
Today
Dame Vivienne Westwood, who was made DBE in the 2006 New Year's Honours List for services to fashion, continues to design fashion collections for men and women and fashion accessories.
From Vivienne Westwood Gold Label collection, Autumn/Winter 2010-11